Check out an alien runner, rotating puzzles, and a casual game that's actually fun!

Sony may have unveiled the PS4 last week, but the closest you'll get to that bad boy in the foreseeable future is watching Jimmy Fallon flail helplessly with the thing. In the meantime, why not enjoy some of the interesting indie games releasing on PCs and consoles recently? All three of these games come recommended, as long as you mind their individual caveats mentioned below. Enjoy!

Bit.Trip Presents... Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien

Game Details

The blocky Colecovision aesthetic of older Bit.Trip titles melts beneath the sneakers of Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien. It's an already-long game title that's made even longer by a new prefix from the retro diehards at Gaijin Games: "Bit.Trip Presents."

The game does a much better job showing off Gaijin's chops than its silly prefix, however. Goodbye, pixels; hello, arts and crafts. Series favorite Commander Video now looks like a Claymation creation as he auto-runs through handmade worlds full of Saturday morning-esque backgrounds and molded baddies.

The levels start out varied and inventive, slowly introducing new moves and level motifs, but the game runs out of novel twists and loses steam about halfway through the five-hour campaign.

That's probably for the best. Any more moves and the controls would be a nightmare. Players still trigger Commander Video's hops, slides, and kicks—all to the beat of a really cool soundtrack from Disasterpeace, the artist behind Fez's tunes. New maneuvers this time around include rail-grinds, slide-motion dodges, a "dance" move that grants points at the cost of maneuverability, and a couple of cumbersome loop-de-loop motions. The hold-to-glide jump still stands out as a favorite, as it adds nuance to the game's endless series of hops.

Runner 2's simplicity comes double-edged then, but plenty of new characters, costumes, and Easter eggs serve as lovely carrots to dangle in front of your sprinter. Other additions—like mid-level checkpoints, adjustable difficulties, and more forgiving landing animations—greatly reduce the controller-throwing frustration of the first Bit.Trip Runner. (It's worth nothing, though, the final PC version I tested seemed to miss my joystick presses every so often.) Varied, well-rendered scenery also entices, along with enjoyable touches like phony commercials and silly narration from Charles "It's-a me, Mario!" Martinet. His presence isn't just lip service (figuratively and literally); it feels like Commander Video finally reaches true mascot status with this latest running adventure.

No game in recent memory has seemed as blatantly Braid-like as The Bridge, but this indie game's two-man development team could have striven for much worse. While the game wears its inspiration on its sleeve clearly, it also strikes its own memorable path.

All of the various puzzles in The Bridge are based on a simple twist: rotate the game world to navigate to the exit and move on. Recent indie platformer And Yet It Moves played with this mechanic as well, but The Bridge favors focused puzzle challenges and clever twists. For example, elements of later levels, like wrecking balls and collectible keys, are subject to reverse gravity. Other levels offer a freezing chamber so the rest of the world can rotate safely or new platforms and passages as you twist the world. All of this happens in black-and-white, graphite-drawn chambers that shamelessly pilfer from the aesthetic estate of M.C. Escher.

Though an entire "reverse" world appears at game's end and collectible trinkets will keep die-hards snooping for The Bridge's errata, it's easy to come out of this game wishing for a few more new mechanics or a more diverse level selection. Some of the "ah-ha" moments are among the best in the genre, but when you hit the game's inevitable "brick wall" puzzles, that's that; you can't skip ahead to other levels. I was forced to try utterly random rotation patterns to solve some frustrating levels and, surprisingly enough, that plan actually worked! That's the price of The Bridge's overly simple puzzle system: brute force is a viable option, which no great puzzle game should ever suffer from.

Leap Day

Game Details

Developer: Spry FoxPublisher: Spry FoxPlatform: WebRelease Date: Jan. 30, 2013Price: Free-to-playLinks:Official website
Spry Fox, the creators of Triple Town, were a bit too eager to launch their next puzzly, free-to-play experiment. The first test version of Leap Day launched in the middle of 2012, long before the core gameplay had taken shape. Now that Leap Day has reached a playable, sensible beta, players can see just what had the Spry Fox team jumping up and down in glee last year. Pardon the hyperbole—especially coming from this admittedly jaded, decade-plus games critic—but Leap Day may have just created an entirely new game genre from its familiar, disparate parts.

I've taken to calling Leap Day a collaborative tinker-toy assembly line. You hop onto a randomly generated planet where you're given a plot of green land in an otherwise frozen plain, and you then unfreeze enough of the world to destroy a scourge of ice beasts. To do so, you make money by arranging a series of roads, train tracks, and cute marshmallow workers to harvest materials like wood, water, fruit, minerals, and more. After a few minutes, the game world resets, and that's when you start to find ways to maximize your output. Why not place a factory to combine goods? How can I best route my roads around that tree without combining roads in the wrong way? I could lay down some train tracks, but then I'd be over budget!

A typical game sees eight players working on a giant plain together, all moving their workers toward the center to finish off the offending monsters within a time limit of a few days. You can't pull it off without maximizing your space and sharing it well with others. Thankfully, the free-to-play system doesn't screw players with annoying pay-to-win limits; Leap Day instead teases players with paid cosmetic tweaks and new items that force new strategies.

Leap Day's basic economy system cannot be solved with real-world cash, and while that design choice may cost Spry Fox a few quick bucks, it goes a long way to hooking players in with one of the most level playing fields casual gaming might ever see. Add in the constantly challenging strategic decisions and a pleasing aesthetic and you have a game that leaps over its casual gaming competition.

Yes! I started playing a micropayments game a while back, but found that it was all just a bit too BS with the payment requirements. I don't want to have to pay just to play it. If it hooks me I might crack out the credit card.

Indie gaming is really maturing, finally, and thank whatever you believe in for that. Mainstream gaming is really on the wane, and I'm finding I am spending almost all of my time now playing either Indie games, much older games on my PC or re-releases on iOS.

I also like your style, Sam. Even where you had your criticisms you seemed very even-handed. A+

Edit:My main complaint is with indie developers. While I can't really blame them, it seems like they are pricing their games with the intent of discounting them on a Steam Sale in the future. For example, Antichamber is NOT worth $20. $15 for The Bridge is pushing it.

These sorts of games were almost always $10 in the past. As good as either game may be... they are pushing it, especially if they aren't offering 1/3 of the experience of a (GOOD) $60 game.

For me, a game better be as revolutionary as Journey for me to be happy paying $15 for something that only lasts a few hours.

I also like your style, Sam. Even where you had your criticisms you seemed very even-handed. A+

Edit:My main complaint is with indie developers. While I can't really blame them, it seems like they are pricing their games with the intent of discounting them on a Steam Sale in the future. For example, Antichamber is NOT worth $20. $15 for The Bridge is pushing it.

These sorts of games were almost always $10 in the past. As good as either game may be... they are pushing it, especially if they aren't offering 1/3 of the experience of a (GOOD) $60 game.

For me, a game better be as revolutionary as Journey for me to be happy paying $15 for something that only lasts a few hours.

I prefer it to free-to-pay-to-play that many games heading towards. I get the idea that free to play lowers the barrier and allows more people to try out your game, get that. But give us the option to just pay $10 and own the game already! Microtransactions drive me insane (particularly if you, like me, have random passwords on your accounts and have to go hunt up KeyPass every time you want to make an online transaction...) I'd rather make the single transaction than feel like I'm being bled to death all the time. I understand how free to play helps them, but can you PLEASE offer a "just buy the game already" option for people like me?

I tend to get frustrated at f2p games that have horribly slow accrual rates for whatever upgrade currency.

What I don't mind these days though are the coin doubler schemes. So the base game is free but xp/currency is fairly slow. For a buck or two you essentially "buy" the game and then your currency generation is at a reasonable/fun rate. Jetpack Joyride is the earliest incarnation of this (although it was'nt free on iOs at the time it started) I can think of, and I keep seeing it more and more frequently.

I also like your style, Sam. Even where you had your criticisms you seemed very even-handed. A+

Edit:My main complaint is with indie developers. While I can't really blame them, it seems like they are pricing their games with the intent of discounting them on a Steam Sale in the future. For example, Antichamber is NOT worth $20. $15 for The Bridge is pushing it.

These sorts of games were almost always $10 in the past. As good as either game may be... they are pushing it, especially if they aren't offering 1/3 of the experience of a (GOOD) $60 game.

For me, a game better be as revolutionary as Journey for me to be happy paying $15 for something that only lasts a few hours.

I prefer it to free-to-pay-to-play that many games heading towards. I get the idea that free to play lowers the barrier and allows more people to try out your game, get that. But give us the option to just pay $10 and own the game already! Microtransactions drive me insane (particularly if you, like me, have random passwords on your accounts and have to go hunt up KeyPass every time you want to make an online transaction...) I'd rather make the single transaction than feel like I'm being bled to death all the time. I understand how free to play helps them, but can you PLEASE offer a "just buy the game already" option for people like me?

I'll agree that's the sentiment of the vast majority, if not the entirety of long time gamers. While it's anectdotal evidence, I've never heard anything positive about F2P (Outside of MMO's) from anyone who played games more than 10 years ago (either because they were in diapers, or they only owned mac products.) While it may be great for the developers because people spend a fortune on Freemium stuff, there's no indication that anyone is actually LEAVING the old business model for the new one. I hope the industry soon realizes this. -- Forums never will.

If I have a steady steam of 100 customers a day selling ice cream, and a frozen yogurt shop opens up next to me that has a steady stream of 300 customers a day... that doesn't make me any better or worse off than I was prior to them moving into the neighborhood. I still have my 100 customers. I was living well, I am still living well now. I used to have 100% of the frozen desert market, now I only have 25% but my costs are the same, profits are the same, really so long as I keep my 100 customers, nothing has changed.

If I have a steady steam of 100 customers a day selling ice cream, and a frozen yogurt shop opens up next to me that has a steady stream of 300 customers a day... that doesn't make me any better or worse off than I was prior to them moving into the neighborhood. I still have my 100 customers. I was living well, I am still living well now. I used to have 100% of the frozen desert market, now I only have 25% but my costs are the same, profits are the same, really so long as I keep my 100 customers, nothing has changed.